Understanding your essential business processes will contribute to your success.

Good business processes capture the organization’s most important asset of a modern organization today. Therefore, the knowledge and understanding of the organizational business processes is crucial for any executive and leaders to understand. The business process forms the lifeline for any organization and helps it streamline individual activities, making sure that resources are put to optimal use. A business process is series of steps performed by a group of stakeholders to achieve a concrete goal. Each step in a business process denotes a task that is assigned to a participant.

Without the knowledge and understanding of the organizational business process you will have problems to implementing or modify your organizational business strategy that will requires changes to operations and people performing the work. By nature, people resist change.

By ensuring that the operational tasks and activities performed by the employees help the organization implement its strategy. If the processes and the strategies are not aligned it usually leads to failure in execution. Because even if the operational tasks are performed correctly, the overall organizational goals are not achieved.

All organization have processes. But not all organizations have put in the time and effort to identify, map, and analyse those processes for efficiency. To create sustained continuous improvements in organizational processes, an organization must first understand its processes. In a services environment, this can be difficult. A service by its very nature requires human interaction – people serving people. This means that a single organizational process may be perceived as diversely as the people performing it. And with merger and acquisition activity commonplace within many service sectors, processes and procedures may not be consistent or well-documented. A process map takes the process description to a whole new level of understanding. Where verbal descriptions provide the basis of the process, the map identifies the flow of each event in a process. The team can then see whether there is a clear path for a process or whether obstacles exist in the form of rework, cloudy decision points, bottlenecks, etc. One of the most interesting aspects of creating a process map in a merged organization is the possibility that the same process in the same department may be described in many ways. This could be the result of merged organizations not merging processes, processing old information with new tools, or processing new information with old tools. It may simply be the diversity of the employees performing the process.

Unfortunately, many executives and leaders do not understand the organizations essential business processes. This makes it nearly impossible for them to streamline their organizations, which puts them at a disadvantage in the marketplace. Which also is the reason that many executives and leaders fail to modify or implement a new strategy in their organization is due to the lack of understanding and knowledge of the existing business processes. To be able to improve performance and modify or implement a new strategy, one need to analyse and identify the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the current business processes before improving them. To do this in a service environment requires understanding perceptions of a process. This can be achieved easily and effectively through employing techniques like a process walk-through to ensure team understanding and inclusion in the documentation process. This builds consensus on current process strengths and shortcomings. This also creates team recognition of areas of improvement targeted to a process and not at people.